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MONTREAL—Best known for blazing original paths into the surreal and bizarre, Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin got down to work Thursday on a project inspired by the faint scent of other directors’ movies that have been lost to the ravages of time and technology.

Maddin began shooting the first of what will be 12 short films completed over 13 days — all of them homages to decades-old silent films for which little more than a title exists.

Director Guy Maddin began filming his performance art installation Seances in Montreal on July 4, 2013.

Winnipeg director Guy Maddin is best known for his 2003 movie The Saddest Music in the World.

“Sometimes I’d just Google ‘lost films’ and a new one would come up,” he recounted during a break in filming on a tiny set in Old Montreal. “When I first collected a little array of lost films that I really wanted to see but knew I never would I realized the only way I’d see them is if I made them myself.”

The project, Seances, is part frenetic film shoot, part performance art installation. The cast of four actors gathered at 8:30 a.m. Thursday on the set to channel the spirit of the original characters. Just outside, pieces of the sets that will be used over the coming days are tucked away behind chairs where members of the public can sit and view the cast and crew at work.

Rarely are there more than two or three rapid-fire takes for a specific scene. It looks like chaos, but there is a plan, says Karine Vanasse, who plays the female lead in the 1916 American film Saint, Devil and Woman, starring the (possibly) Montreal-born Florence La Badie.

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“The director needs to know precisely what he wants — not in advance, but when he needs to make a decision. But I love when you feel that the crew around him is there to support his vision, whatever it is, even if he changes his mind at the last minute or if he’s more inspired by this or by that,” she said.

Maddin, who is best known for 2003’s The Saddest Music in the World, is more humble about his project, which follows a similar undertaking in Paris and will be succeeded by a shoot in New York.

“I’m not remaking it perfectly. In some cases I’ll be channelling the spirit of a lost F. W. Murnau movie — maybe the greatest filmmaker of all time —but I’m just Guy Maddin, arguably the second-or-third-best filmmaker in Manitoba at any given time,” he said.

When Maddin began compiling a list of lost films, he soon realized that they were dominated by white males in Hollywood, England, Paris or Berlin — something he said wasn’t reflective of cinema at the turn of the 19th century. Back then, every country had its own burgeoning film industries and there were many female directors producing silent films.

The lineup for Seances includes Maddin’s take on films going back as far as 1898 from countries including China, Philippines, Hungary, Italy and Japan. In addition to the possible Canadian ties to Saint, Devil and Woman, he has included his take on the 1918 film The Scorching Flame by director Armand Robin and 1929’s Scout Day, which the director said involves a group of Scouts from Quebec shipping out to fight imperial Germany.

The less information about the film, the greater the challenge. But it also gives Maddin greater creative freedom, which he cherishes.

“Sometimes there’s just a title and a director and a country and it’s really sad, but it’s really intriguing,” he said. “Sometimes the lost movie’s based on a novel and it almost feels like cheating if you’re adapting one of those. Sometimes there’s a synopsis, sometimes there’s a script and then some publicity stills. Sometimes there’s even fragments of film or even maybe five minutes of footage,” he said.

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But true to form, Maddin refused to watch any existing footage no matter how fragmentary, although he can’t wait to compare his product with the original.

When the production is finished, the films will be available on the website of the National Film Board where, using a unique program, will shuffle the films together into a longer narrative with “one-of-a-kind combination” and its own unique title.

“People watching will see a film come back from the afterworld, watch it and then no one will ever be able to see it again,” Maddin said.

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